One thing I didn’t buy yesterday was a MacBook Air. I went to the Chestnut Hill Mall Apple store to see what it looked like but they didn’t have any to show. The store won’t have any to look at for two more weeks.
Instead I ordered a MacBook from the Apple Education for MIT site (they are about $100 less there, and there’s a savings on AppleCare). When it gets here in a few days, I’ll clone my MacBook Pro’s hard drive to the MacBook and send the MBP to my son. They only thing I’ll miss, I suspect is the lighted keyboard, something I’ve come to like a lot. I ordered the 250GB drive and I’ll shop around for a RAM upgrade.
Then, with the savings, I’m thinking pretty seriously about an iPhone, something that would be fun to play with for the Museum Without Walls.
The iPhones I looked at at the Apple store had the new location detection firmware. The store is here but the phone indicated it was a good 1000′ southeast of the store, south of what’s labeled Holyhood Cemetery. That’s not exactly pinpoint accuracy. But the Skyhook wifi database may not have included the mall, and thus the iPhone was probably using the Google cell-tower locations to find itself. Skyhook claims 10-20m accuracy in urban areas. That sounds pretty reasonable to me.